What is needed is only this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going within and meeting no one else for hours – that is what one must learn to attain.*
Rainer Maria Rilke

There are many things that keep us away from the home that is being our truest selves, from being at home with ourselves.

Busyness, hurriedness, fear of what we will find and what we will not find, things we have done to ourselves, things others have done to us … only begin a long list.

The solitude Rainer Maria Rilke writes about, I imagine to be on the far side of interdependence, which itself lies on the far side of independence.

Whilst being dependent is to have no self, independence is to find a self but may also abandon us to our false self.

Being open to others and to all things is to be attentive to the uniqueness of all, including ourselves, in whom we find our home, and out of which we bring our treasures to others.

*Rainer Maria Rilke quoted in Maria Popova’s The Marginalian: Rilke on the Relationship Between Solitude, Love, Sex, and Creativity.